Gericom Silver Shadow or Clevo 3420

The Gericom Silver Shadow
seems to be the same model as the
Clevo 3420
which seems to be same as the 3220, 3620 and their predecessors
3200, 3400 and 3600 except for the enclosures.
I bought my Silver Shadow at Magic Devices.

Left side: PS/2-keyboard/mouse, CPU-fan-out, USB,
PC-Card-slot and line-in, headphones, microphone (the harddisk
is behind/above this three jacks)

I added a 500 MB swap-partition and several Linux-partitions for /,
/boot, /home, /var, /tmp, etc.
After installation I compiled my own kernel with this
configuration (/usr/src/linux/.config) and
changed some settings in /etc/rc.config.

X11

Yast2 detects the ATI Rage Pro and installs a ready to use
/etc/XF86Config.
To use 3D-applications with hardware accelleration this must be
added:
Section "Module"
Load "glx.so"
EndSection
and in section "Device":
Option "no_font_cache"
Option "no_pixmap_cache"

To get faster touchpad-control I need to add xset m 4
to my ~/.xinitrc.

To speed up the graphic display, you can use the MTRR:
echo "base=0xfd000000 size=0x800000 type=write-combining" > /proc/mtrr
E.g.
vice,
an C=64-emulator, is speeded up from 39 fps to 65 fps.

APM

I use apmd for a
clean suspend. The most important is to let apmd switch from X11 to
a console before suspending. This is achieved by this line in
/etc/rc.config.d/apmd.rc.config
APMD_LEAVE_X_BEFORE_SUSPEND="yes"
After the suspend there are two probems:

The X-pointer is somewhat malformed. This can be avoided by
using a software-cursor instead of the hardware-cursor by adding
this line to the "Device"-section of
/etc/XF86Config:
Option "sw_cursor"
But the software-cursor has a problem to update the
background.
Try both to find out, what is less bugging. Or try a newer
XFree. I use 3.3.6

Some sort of timer is running much too slow. There is something
very weird going on in the kernel. E.g. an "time sleep 10" takes
half a minute an prints out 2 seconds.
Perhaps a newer kernel than 2.2.16 will fix it.

You can spin down the harddisk to save power:hdparm -S 2 /dev/hda
But the kupdate-process will wake up the disk every 5 seconds to
write some buffers.
You can view the current kupdate-settings either withcat /proc/sys/vm/bdflush
or withupdate -d
The documentation is in the kernel (where else?) in
/usr/src/linux/fs/buffer.c (Search for "bdflush_param").
The standard-values areupdate -4 500 -5 3000 -6 500
what means, that kupdate is activated every 5 seconds and writes
normal buffers older than 30 seconds and superblock buffers older
than 5 seconds.
Kupdate can be disabled by update -4 0 and the largest
interval is one minute (6000) without patching the kernel.
As an alternative you can disable kupdate and run sync by
cron or let the disk sync only when there is a disk-access
anyway:

PC-Card-slot

The PC-Card-slot is is a "Ricoh RL5C475 rev 80" and is recognized by
pcmcia-cs
3.1.11 and newer (or even earlier versions, too).

Sound

The soundcard Avance Logic ALS 300+ is supported by
OSS version 3.9.3o and
newer.
Unfortunately Avance Logic does not release documentation for this
chip, so there will be no
ALSA-support in the
nearer future.

DVD and floppy

The DVD-drive works as /dev/hdb like an normal ATAPI-CDROM without a
special driver.
It can be hot-swapped with the floppy-drive. You only need to make
sure, that the drive is not mounted, or you will get a kernel-panic.
The floppy is a normal floppy and appears as /dev/fd0. No special
driver is required.

IrDA

I have only tried to load the modules irtty and irport and that
seems to work. Unfortunately I have no IR-device to test this.

Modem (internal)

The internal modem is a sub-function of the sound-chip ALS-300+. In
/proc/pci you will see it: